Compare / Figma vs Pinterest
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Figma
BUSINESS MODEL
Figma
Figma uses a freemium model. Individual designers can use Figma for free with up to three active projects.
Teams pay per editor per month — $15 for Professional, $45 for Organization and $75 for Enterprise. Viewers are always free, which was revolutionary.
In Sketch, if a developer wanted to inspect a design, they needed a license. In Figma, you just send them a link.
This "free viewers, paid editors" model was genius because it turned every designer into a distribution channel. A designer joins a company, uses Figma, invites 50 engineers and PMs to view files, and suddenly the whole company is embedded in the Figma ecosystem.
When decision-makers see everyone already using it, upgrading to a paid team plan is automatic.
Revenue grew from essentially nothing in 2018 to over $600 million a year by 2023, and past $700 million by the time the company went public in 2025. The company was profitable by mid-2022 — unusual for a venture-backed startup.
They achieved this without a massive enterprise sales team. The product spread bottom-up through organizations, designer by designer, team by team.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Figma
Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University in 2012 after interning at Flipboard and winning a Thiel Fellowship — Peter Thiel's program that pays students $100,000 to leave college and start something. His co-founder Evan Wallace was a Brown classmate and graphics programming wizard who'd built impressive WebGL demos that proved browsers could handle complex visual work.
Their original idea wasn't even a design tool. Field initially wanted to build a flight search engine, then pivoted to drone photography, before landing on the insight that would define Figma: professional creative tools were stuck in the desktop era while everything else had moved to the cloud.
Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch — all required downloads, all worked on local files, and none of them let two people work on the same file simultaneously.
The technical challenge was enormous. Nobody believed you could build a high-performance vector graphics editor that ran entirely in a web browser.
Field and Wallace spent three years — 2012 to 2015 — just building the rendering engine before they had a product anyone could use. They basically had to invent new technology for browser-based graphics processing.
The first public beta launched in December 2015, and designers immediately noticed something no other tool offered: real-time multiplayer editing, like Google Docs but for design.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Figma
Figma grew almost entirely through product-led growth — the product was so good and so easy to share that it spread virally through design teams. Every shared Figma link was marketing.
Every viewer who saw a design file in their browser without downloading anything was a conversion event.
The "free viewers" decision was the single most important growth lever. Traditional design tools charged per seat.
Figma said: only editors pay, everyone else is free. This removed all friction from collaboration and meant that for every paying designer, there might be 10-20 free viewers — all of whom experienced the product and became advocates.
Community was the second engine. Figma's open plugin system and free template marketplace created an ecosystem that locked in users.
Designers built their workflows around Figma-specific plugins, teams built design systems in Figma components, and switching costs climbed. By 2022, Figma had become the default — not just a design tool, but the operating system for product design.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Figma
The Adobe acquisition saga was the biggest test. In September 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for $20 billion — the largest private software acquisition ever proposed.
Designers panicked. Would Adobe kill Figma's culture?
Bloat it with features? Integrate it into Creative Cloud and ruin the simplicity?
The deal fell apart in December 2023 when European regulators signaled they'd block it on antitrust grounds. Adobe walked away and paid a $1 billion breakup fee.
Figma was independent again — but now had to prove it could grow into a $20 billion company on its own.
Competition is intensifying. Canva is pushing into professional design.
Adobe is rebuilding its own collaborative tools. And newer entrants are using AI to generate designs automatically, potentially reducing the need for traditional design tools altogether.
Figma's challenge is staying ahead in a market it created while expanding into adjacent categories like presentations, whiteboarding, and development handoff.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Figma
Figma Design — the core browser-based interface design tool with real-time multiplayer collaboration, component libraries, auto-layout, and prototyping. FigJam — a collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, diagramming, and planning that competes with Miro and Mural.
Dev Mode — a workspace specifically for developers to inspect designs, extract code snippets, and understand spacing and styling without bothering designers. Figma Slides — presentation software launched in 2024 that lets teams build slide decks using the same design tools and component libraries.
Community — a marketplace of free and paid design templates, plugins, and UI kits created by designers worldwide.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Figma
Index Ventures led the Series A and has been involved in nearly every round. Greylock Partners was an early backer.
Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital invested in growth rounds. Addition (Lee Fixel's fund) led the Series E that valued Figma at $10 billion.
After the Adobe deal collapsed, a 2024 tender offer valued Figma at $12.5 billion, and the company went public on the NYSE in July 2025 at a considerably higher price. Peter Thiel was indirectly connected through the Thiel Fellowship that funded Dylan Field's early journey.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.